Russia, not to be outdone by their puppet Trump, also declared a national emergency to combat an invasion last week.

The residents of Novaya Zemlya, a region of Russia whose name translates, roughly, as “frozen bog where you would have to be out of your friggin’ mind to live in the first place,” are being terrorized by invaders. These invaders are all white, as are the residents of Novaya Zemlya, so there is no racism involved. It’s more species-ism, since the invaders are polar bears.

There are eerie parallels to the Trumped-up emergency at our Mexican border. The bears are moving in on Novaya Zemlya because where they were living before is no good for them. Global warming, which is popular in Russia because that nation's most popular indoor sport is freezing your nipples off, is nonetheless causing the ice sheets up north to dissolve. This is where the bears make their living, killing seals that pop up through the ice to breathe. Now that there is no ice to pop up through, the seals can breathe anywhere they want, and wisely chose to inhale where there are no polar bears.

Likewise, the polar bears are doing a job no Novaya Zemlyan wants to do—going through the garbage of Novaya Zemlya and eating the bits that humans have already determined are too yucky to snack down on. The locals don’t appreciate this, however—they are frightened out of their skins when they see hungry polar bears roaming their streets, much as a wary American might panic because he or she overheard someone speaking Spanish at a Walmart. Russian parents won't send their kids to school, for fear of them being eaten at the bus stop, just like American parents are alarmed if their children have to go to school with a little brown kid who doesn't know how to text in English.

Like Mexico, the polar bears are not sending Russia their best polar bears. They are sending ALL their polar bears. All these beasts want is to escape starvation in their homelands. They are seeking asylum in Russian garbage dumps, eating frozen borscht and turnips, though if the Novaya Zemlyans have any freshly killed seal they don’t know what to do with, the bears would surely appreciate that.

Many of these polar bear caravans contain females and cubs, but that doesn’t cut them any slack in Russian opinion, because female and cub polar bears, just like the males, will kill you AND eat you, which even M-13 seldom does.

Faced with this bear invasion, the Russians are doing what any sensible nation that actually has a problem with immigrants coming in and terrorizing its citizens would do. They are separating the cubs from their mothers and putting them in cages, naturally, but most importantly, THEY ARE BUILDING A WALL!

Numerous stories appeared last week about Harvard scientists conjecturing that the interstellar item Oumuamua, which is Hawaiian for “mysterious, cigar-shaped object,” which cruised past Earth from the depths of space a while back, was indeed an alien probe sent by an interstellar civilization to take a gander at our solar system.

The evidence for this is that Oumuamua sped up as it was leaving the solar system. It vamoosed like a biker who accidentally wanders into a gay bar. Already traveling at a brisk 196,000 miles an hour, it apparently took one look at our planet and hit the gas. These Harvard guys could think of no other way of accounting for this phenomenon other than ET putting the pedal to the metal.

They’ve got some convincing points. For one thing, going 196,000 miles an hour seems like tootling right along. Certainly, if you slam on the brakes at 196,000 miles an hour, every alien on board is going through the windshield, but to really get anywhere in interstellar space you have to go much, much faster. At 196,000 miles an hour it would take you thousands of years to get to the next star over. If you speed up to 196,000 miles a minute, it still takes 60 or 70 years, so you still need plenty of toys and videos for the kids in the back, or else they’ll be playing slug-bug for light years at a time.

And after going to all that trouble, the aliens bugged out after taking one look at us. Maybe they noticed we were cooking our perfectly nice planet in a crock-pot of carbon dioxide. Maybe they decided to get gone when they figured out that most of us would happily nuke them, just to see if they were impervious to hydrogen bombs, like they always are in the movies. Maybe they logged on to the Internet and noticed it was nothing but images of Trump and porn.

Maybe they made a comment on Facebook and were viciously attacked by a bunch of low-IQ strangers working for a troll farm in Belarus.

Anyway, they’re gone. And it’s no use to go running after them, begging them to listen to PBS, tour our museums and check out the cool shit we left on the moon. Vainly, we’ll strain to enumerate the accomplishments of mankind. They’ll just listen to us patiently and say when we’re done, “Yeah, but what about all those dick pics?” Then they’ll proceed with the process of digging out.

There’s nothing to do but spruce up the place a bit before the next batch of aliens comes to call. It could be a while, so everybody doesn’t have to buy a Prius tomorrow, but we could get started in little ways, like sucking some of the plastic out of the oceans and tossing fewer bombs and missiles at each other. If we behave better, maybe next time the aliens will stop and give us a stash of live-forever pills, or at least reveal all the secrets of the universe that they know and we don’t.

Or they could just blow on by again, following the Oumuamuans to wherever they’re going, maybe to a planet where the highest form of life is still a bunch of smart apes living in the jungle.

Another month, another massive hurricane sweeping through the underparts of Dixie. This one seemed even more calculated to hit Trump country than the last. It was originally projected to hit right around Disney World, but it swerved left, sparing Mickey Mouse but taking dead aim at the redneckiest portion of Florida.

The parts of Florida inhabited by retired Democrats were likewise treated to little more than a steady breeze. Miami and West Palm were untouched. Daytona survived unscathed, so the next spring break will party as hard as ever. Not a single Life Alert went off in Tampa Bay, the unofficial waiting room of the afterlife.

The Panhandle, though, which voted about 80/20 for Trump, looks today like it was hit by a titanic Leaf Blower from Hell. We Democrats in California, smug in the knowledge that we don’t get hurricanes, can blame Michael on global warming, which we are also going to suffer from less that Florida, because most of our state is many feet above sea level, whereas most of Florida is only the height of a tall bar stool above the ocean, but the deplorables in the panhandle of FL cannot, because they are not allowed to believe in it.

It is one of the inarguable articles of Republican faith that global warming is a myth perpetuated by Democrats and solar-power salesmen, so the thinking here is that perhaps the Trump voters of the Deep South are coming to a faith-based conclusion that God hates them.

Not all of them are, of course. Here’s a link to a claim by a self-described prophet who thinks that the Democrats control the weather and created Michael out of pique at the Kavanaugh confirmation. Only the most gullible of the deplorables would believe that. Even the ones who firmly believe that Hillary operated a basement child sex-slave ring out of a pizza shop with no basement are going to scratch their noggins and think, “Hey, if the Democrats controlled the weather, Mitch McConnell would get hit by lightning about fifteen times a day.”

You bet he would. And we’d also have a storm surge wipe out both Fox News and PornHub, so Trump wouldn’t have anything to watch on TV.​

So, it’s God that hates you guys, and who can blame Him? Imagine you just took your first Oxy of the day and re-posted the meme above, even though you know that’s a picture of your favorite step-niece sleeping off the roofie you slipped into her PBR at the family reunion, and there’s not even a pool in the picture. God takes one look at that in His feed and thinks, “That little fuck deserves to have a 12-foot wall of water hit all 8 rusting vehicles in his front yard, drown all the hounds beneath his porch and wash his Obama hanging in effigy out to sea.”

Or maybe you’re hiding behind your local statue of a Confederate hero, clutching your AR-15 and waiting for the antifa to show up, and God spots you and says to himself, “I’ll show that bonehead what he really needs to be afraid of,” and drops an oak tree on your brain case.

Here, we’re just saying it appears that God has taken time off from spinning the galaxies to bring a little retribution on your flat asses, according to your own theology, so maybe you ought to lighten up a little. Put your Nikes back on. Quit chanting “Lock her up!” and “Build the wall!” when you’re buying donuts at the Piggly-Wiggly.

In the meantime, the damage has been done. But don’t worry. Trump will be in your hood soon, tossing paper towels your way, with Melania by his side, wearing her flood flip-flops.

​As Hurricane Florence punches its way through the groin of Trump country, precious votes are in danger of being swept away. The death toll in the heart of Deplorableland was only fourteen as of this writing, but it’s bound to rise, although not as high as Puerto Rico’s did, because the Carolinas are populated by white people who can vote for President and Puerto Rico is crawling with brown people who cannot.

There’s not going be so many dead people from Florence that Trump will have to declare that they are not dead, which is what he did with Puerto Rico. Declaring people not dead is a new path for the federal government, and some details of it obviously need to be worked out, because alternatives to those people being dead have not been advanced. Perhaps FEMA should suggest that maybe they are just avoiding bill collectors by lying low, or that they are hiding out in the Everglades.

But in the case of Florence, if you need rescuing and want to make sure you get on the A-list for it, there are steps that are advisable. Attach the biggest Confederate flag you own to the roof of your house or trailer. This lets rescuers know you keep your heritage proud by voting Republican, even though you are currently begging for help from the government that kicked your noble forefathers’ asses.

If you don’t have a Confederate flag, do you really deserve to survive? Just kidding, there are other things you can do. FEMA is aware that all of your Confederate flags might have been ripped up or burned by antifas or gay people. MAGA hats are good. Even make your son-in-law who is a Democrat put one on, if you think he is worth rescuing. Or if you’re tired of him canceling out your vote, just push him onto one of those logs full of snakes floating by.

If you left all your MAGA hats in your truck parked by the creek, though, and said creek is now a half-mile wide torrent of raging water, making your wheels hard to find, get creative. Hold up a sign. “FLORENCE=FAKE NEWS” is a suggestion. Also, “I DON’T SPEAK MEXICAN.” And, "YOU'LL BE ABLE TO PULL MY GUN FROM MY COLD DEAD FINGERS IF YOU DON'T RESCUE ME SOON," is excellent, if a trifle wordy. But if you have enough cardboard and people to hold it up, probably the best would be “THIS HURRICANE IS NOT A SYMPTOM OF CLIMATE CHANGE.”

Misspelling it is okay. “THIS HURCANE IS NOT A SIMTUM OF CLIMUTT CHANGE” might get rescuers to the roof you are clinging to even faster. And as you sit in a shelter with a thousand other displaced people, sipping hot chocolate that only tastes marginally better than the mud your living room is filling up with, you’ll thank me silently for this advice.

The ET's aren't coming--they destroyed their own planet a couple millenia ago

​Some scientists are saying that there is a good argument to be made that human beings are the only intelligent life form in the universe, which is leading other people to think “The universe ought to be pretty well ashamed of itself, then.”

These researchers are not just ego-tripping—they point out that if civilizations way older than ours existed they would have started broadcasting radio signals into space thousands of years ago, and we would certainly be able to tune in to advanced alien versions of Dr. Pimple Popper and My 600 Pound Alien Life, were any being produced.

We can’t, though, and there’s a deeper reason for that other than the fact that 600 pounds might be a perfectly average weight for an advanced alien. That reason is called the Fermi Paradox. The FP, briefly summarized, is that any beings advanced enough to invent technology will eventually destroy themselves, going extinct or at least degenerating into packs of leather-clad savages chasing each other around the barren landscape in dune buggies armed with machine guns.

The Fermi Paradox is named after Enrico Fermi, who after developing this theory that we are all eventually doomed, invented the atomic bomb to assist the process. You can’t make this stuff up.

Anyway, the paradox states that any critters smart enough to discover how to use fire will eventually cease to exist, nuking or global-warming themselves out of existence. Just consider the human race—you’ll nod and say, “Hell, yeah, we could do that.”

That’s what happened to any alien civilization that developed before us. They grew wealthy and populous, dominating their planet, sucking up all its resources while sitting around eating salty snacks and watching reality TV, until they started a world war with hydrogen bombs, cooked themselves in their own swill, or invented Terminators. All those alien signals from Too Many Tentacles for the Dress and Housewives of Arcturus swept past the Earth years ago, while our ancestors were sitting in prehistoric mud, and are heading out to the other galaxies, where other life-forms will blow themselves up before they can receive them.

The aliens don't exist then, at least contemporaneously. Many people will be disappointed by this, especially people that make aliens the centerpiece of science fiction features or who have been kidnapped by them.

But the Fermi Paradox can now be summed up much more succinctly, and Orwellianly. How about this?

If there’s one thing we learned in the last two weeks of August, it’s that there are two things that can still bring this divided nation together.

Unfortunately, they are total eclipses of the sun and 500-year floods, neither of which are likely to happen again anytime soon.

Of course, we know exactly when the next total eclipse will be—those scientist people seem to be right on top of that, in spite of the fact that all of them believe in the hoax of global warming and the lie of evolution. The next one that crosses the US will be in 2024. It will also be right overhead in Mazatlán, Mexico, where my woman and I plan to be to watch it. We watched the last one on TV. Eclipses, like professional football, are probably better on TV, but viewing them in person means you don’t have to listen to the announcers on CNN chortle about them continuously.

Then there was the flood in Texas. CNN was right on top of that as well, so we got an up-close look at the flood, too, because a few years ago my Significant Other purchased an HDTV that is roughly the size of a ping-pong table. We felt like we could crawl into the holes people were punching in their roofs to survive, the coverage was so intimate.

We saw the thousands of boats people launched to rescue strangers from roofs, trees and overpasses. We appreciated the rescuers. We thought, like many of us did, that this represented the real America, not the cartoon America we’ve inhabited since January.

Then the cartoon America showed up, too, in the appearance of armed militia men eager to shoot looters. So, many guys who had both guns and boats had to make the morally ambiguous choice between rescuing strangers and shooting looters.

Most of them ended up in the rescue squad, because there seemed to be way more people who needed rescuing than there were looters, but I am sure there were people who wanted to do both, because most people naturally want to be heroes, and many of them want to be killers, and being a heroic killer is the best thing of all.

If you don’t believe me, you haven’t watched many movies.

Then Trump showed up and proved once again he has no idea how to do anything, unless you count self-absorbed screeching as a thing, and Melania got her fair share of criticism too, because she was filmed wearing stiletto pumps as she dashed off to Texas, shoes that probably cost more than most of the bass boats plucking people from their roofs.​I think that’s unfair. Look at the girl. Does she look like she owns a pair of rubber waders?

I was wondering if God approved of Trump backing America’s ass out of the Paris climate accords when lo, He appeared to me.

Some people are skeptical about the fact that God makes regular revelations to me, and ask pointed questions about it, like how He manifests Himself. The answer is sometimes in Person, sometimes by cell phone. His latest appearance was made on Skype.

My critics also ask if I can call Him anytime I want. Sure, but I don’t. His number always goes straight to voicemail, and if you think He’s going to act on my message or yours, try praying to win the lottery and see what doesn’t happen.

“My Lord,” I exclaimed, when His image appeared on my tablet after that weird Skype ringtone.

“I get that a lot,” He replied. “I’m kind of a big thing.”

“Have you come to proclaim your Word on planetary warming?”

“Not really. I’m a little undecided about it.”

“I didn’t realize You were capable of indecision, Lord.”

“Oh, hell yeah. Can’t make up My mind about lots of stuff. Runs in the family. Why do you think Jesus is taking so long to come back?

“I would think you’d be against us slow-cooking the globe.”

“Remember what I said. I did give you guys dominion over it. Which the dolphins bitch about EVERY SINGLE DAY, by the way.”

“What about low-lying island nations and swampy places where millions of people live, like Bangladesh? How are those people going to escape the rising oceans?”

“Meh. Did I ask anybody to row a couple thousand miles just to get away from their neighbors? And don’t bother Me about Bangladesh. Haven’t I wapped it with enough cyclones? Those people need to get a clue and move to higher ground. Like Filipinos need to stay off ferries, before I capsize another one.”

“I didn’t realize there were particular peoples you favored more than others, Oh Lord.”

“BLASPHEMY! I LOVE EVERYBODY, which, frankly, is one of the most harrowing things about this job. But some people appeal to Me more than others. Like coal miners. They pray a lot, believe Me. And they look so cute when they’re covered in coal dust. And they write great folk songs (Here the Almighty paused to hum a few bars of “Down Deep in the Mine”).

“So, You’re going to let us torch the planet to save a few coal-mining jobs? You’re on the same page as Trump!”

“Well, when you put it that way, it doesn’t seem like such a good idea. But remember, whatever happens, it’s My will, even if I haven’t put much thought into it. That’s the way I roll.”

The Almighty seemed poised on the cusp of self-discovery, but just then the connection started to fuzz out.

It is now possible to take a cruise ship through the Northwest Passage, thanks to global warming and Crystal Cruises​, as long as you are willing to plop down a minimum of 22 grand for the trip, plus an extra $50,000 for “emergency evacuation” insurance.

This, we assume, is in case you hit an iceberg, of which there are still many that haven’t completely melted in the Arctic, and which cruise ship operators have been very touchy about ever since that Titanic thing. If the Crystal Serenity goes down, the US Department of Defense is ready to rescue the passengers and is practicing to do so at considerable cost to the taxpayers. Yes, your tax dollars are being spent to assure the safety of these bloated eco-snobs, who plan on enjoying golf, gourmet dining and fine wines right until the moment they crash into an ice cube the size of Delaware County, PA,* whereupon brave and well-trained rescue squads will fish them out of the Arctic waters and chopper them back to land.

“Why bother with that?” you might ask. “They’re just going to dry them off and send them back to their day jobs, which for most of them consist of making my IRA disappear.”

That’s a good question, for which this column has no real answer. We have cruised, however, in Alaska if not the Arctic, and are anxious to provide insight on how to behave on board.

We had an unlimited drink package on our voyage, and I assume for a minimum of 22 large, which is more than ten times what we paid, the cocktails are free as well, so your first job is to stay drunk. I don’t mean to boast here, but this was almost effortless for us.

On our voyage we stopped at a different Alaskan port almost every day, and we took the option of stumbling off onto the shore just to enjoy the novelty of paying for our drinks. There were a multitude of other activities offered, all by cheerful vendors who were no more attached to Alaska than we were—they just moved there for the summer to sell us souvenirs.

On the Northwest Passage cruise, the passengers aren’t going to get much of that, as there are no ports to call on, due to the fact that the passageway was covered with ice year-round until enough of us drove enough Hummers to induce it to melt. There is one port on the way, the far northern village of Ulukhaktok, whose members are being trained by the Canadian government, at expense to Canadian taxpayers, on how to host a cruise ship carrying four times the number of people that live in their village.

This training consists mainly of fitting the word “Ulukhaktok” on a t-shirt, if our experience is any guide. Plus they could invent some boring local lore to mumble at the passengers as they drive them along the featureless tundra. Also they could throw up some zip lines between the icebergs and offer to help the tourists paddle around in kayaks so they could enjoy the thrill of being crushed by ice floes.

The original adventurers who tried to find the Northwest Passage before it existed did this, along with being frozen in the Arctic ice over the winter, being chased by polar bears, and dying of starvation after they ran out of spoiled whale blubber to eat.

The Crystal Serenity, on the other hand, chases polar bears. A passenger on a previous Arctic expedition described it as follows:

“I think that’s why we kept getting closer and closer even as they tried to swim away, crossing a cove and scrambling up a cliff. There were people on the cruise—a minority, to be sure—who later criticized the decision to follow them. Polar bears, they pointed out, often go up to a month without finding anything to eat and can ill afford to waste precious calories paddling away from people, even if those people only want to share pictures of them on Facebook.

But I’m not sure we had a choice. … If we hadn’t seen any polar bears, I think there might have been a riot.”

I can see his point—I would hate to have to tell my grandchildren “Yes, your grandmother was lost in the Great Polar Bear Riot of ’16,” but polar bears, on the other hand, make their living waiting around holes in the ice for seals to come up for air, and then bite their heads and drag them onto the land to devour them. I think it’s safe to say this is, at the very least, unpleasant for the seals.

The less ice there is, the fewer holes there are, so the polar bears are in danger of following the dodo into extinction anyway, and chasing a few around with a 900-foot cruise ship probably isn’t going to make much of a difference to them, long-term survival-wise.​Plus, imagine the hearty flippers-up we’re getting from the seals.

Elon Musk, who has a name that sounds like a smutty cologne and is one of those people you hear a lot about but are not quite sure what they do, like Richard Branson or Nicole Richie, has proposed dropping nuclear bombs on Mars to make it more habitable. We have tried nuking places on Earth, and the popular feeling is that it has made them less habitable. Of course, they bounce back—Hiroshima, Bikini Atoll, Chernobyl are all considered much better off today than when they were originally blistered with radiation. On Mars, it would be different, Musk says. We would nuke the Martian polar caps so that they would melt and evaporate into the Martian atmosphere, which would start a greenhouse effect, which once again is considered bad on Earth but a stunningly good idea on Mars. Many scientists spoke up immediately, saying Musk's idea was stupid, because you might start a nuclear winter on Mars, and winters there are cold enough already, with temps dipping down to minus 195 (Fahrenheit, of course, because I am a natural, metric-hating American). That's nippy. You wouldn't want it to get much colder than that, or Mars could turn into a place like Pluto, where you have to get up first thing in the morning and melt some atmosphere before you can breathe. Still, the idea of nuking Mars is better than the idea of nuking anyplace on Earth, especially Israel. There's a lot of worry in Israel that Iran will get the bomb, now that the Iranians have agreed not to build one. "Say what?" some people say when they hear this, but they are Democrats. Republicans, of which the Prime Minister of Israel seems to be one, are certain that the first step towards getting the bomb is agreeing not to get one, and Iran's letting UN inspectors trample all over their Persian pride by being allowed to check every high school locker in the country for nuclear nuggets is just a ruse, and the first thing they will do with that bomb, once they have it, is nuke Israel. Of course the Israelis have plenty of bombs themselves, and probably way better ones than the Iranians could cook up, and if Iran decided to cobble together an A-bomb and launch it as Israel, Israel would respond by turning Iran into a place that looked a bit like Mars, complete with only really being safe enough to be visited by robots, just like Mars is. The bet here is that the Ayatollahs aren't going to do that—they're having way too much fun beating women for not wearing the right kind of Muslim bonnets in public and forbidding people from owning small, yappy dogs. So if the Iranians get a bomb and really want to use it, they could team up with Elon Musk and drop it on Mars, thereby simultaneously improving that planet and making our planet, especially the Israeli and Republican parts of it, less nervous about them. Talk about your elegant solutions.

Gary Kiehne, Republican candidate for Congress in Arizona, has boldly claimed that “99% of mass shootings are committed by Democrats.” Ordinarily this column would not take note of Mr. Kiehne, except perhaps to wish wistfully that his name is pronounced so that it rhymes with “hiney,” but his discovery that insane blood-lust is nearly exclusively linked to membership in the Democratic party promises insight, if not a solution, to America’s epidemic of spree and serial killers. What evidence Mr. Kiehne has for his claim is being kept by him, but I’m sure it exists, scribbled texts in blood or crayon made by these deranged minds before they went out to commit their dreadful deeds, notes like “Go to mall and kill and kill and kill until the voices in my head command me to stop, but first donate to Nancy Pelosi’s re-election campaign” and checklists like “1. Lock up freezer full of human body parts so that it doesn't spring open accidentally while loading onto U-Haul. 2. Buy fresh bag of lime. 3. Register as Democrat at new address.” Thanks to Mr. Kiehne, in the future when people talk about the 1%, they will not be talking about the fabulously wealthy-- they will be talking about Republican mass murderers. We’re grateful to Mr. Kiehne for these insights. While he might not make it to Congress, he has still shown us that no matter how much spell-check hates your name, you can still make a contribution to society. Speaking of the socially prominent, Pat Sajak, the host of “Wheel of Fortune,” a show watched religiously by the Viagra demographic, tweeted his opinion of believers in global warming, i.e., that they are “unpatriotic racists.” Most people would agree that Pat, as the only man in America who sells vowels for a living, is qualified to go toe-to-toe with the scientific community and put the kibosh on their annoying theories. The question is why would he go all Cliven Bundy and inject racism into an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with race? It’s easy to explain--it’s because nowadays “racist” is the new "a-hole!” When people cut you off in traffic or dump their garbage over your fence, it is now socially correct, although still logically incoherent, to call them racists if you are bored with conventional epithets. Republicans are angry with Obama again, this time for declaring the Organ Mountains in New Mexico near the Mexican border a national monument. They think the designation of these mountains as a national treasure is an overreach by the federal government. I don't see this. If you look at a picture of the mountains, you will see that they are pretty steep to consider building condos on, or even drive an ATV over. Republicans are also worried that illegal immigration will be encouraged by the peak's national monument status. Apparently, they believe that illegals are flocking across the border just for the scenery, because there is none in Mexico.

Finally, Florida lawmaker Charles Van Zandt has declared that the Common Core curriculum being promoted by the government in an effort to graduate students who know more than how to stare at their phones all day, even though they will actually probably spend their lives staring at their phones like their parents do now, is actually a plot to make kids gay. Common Core is mostly controversial because of its math component, which parents think is “stupid.” A similar controversy erupted back in our youth, when something called “New Math” was introduced. It replaced the Old Math, which concerned itself with numbers of the thorniest sort, often crammed together sadistically in a process called “Long Division.” The New Math was much easier—it consisted of thinking about things in “sets” and figuring out whether these sets overlapped or not. About the same time, the first stirrings of gay self-awareness started manifesting themselves. Could it be that gayness, which was previously sublimated by the agony of long division, began when New Math students started saying to themselves “Hey, I’m in the gay set!” This guy Van Zandt might be on to something.